Humphrey Jennings

Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings (19 August 1907 – 24 September 1950) was an English documentary filmmaker and one of the founders of the Mass Observation organisation. Jennings was described by film critic and director Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as: "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced."[1]

After graduating with a starred First Class degree in English, Jennings undertook post graduate research in the poet Thomas Gray, under the supervision of a predominantly absent I. A. Richards, who was teaching abroad. After abandoning what looked like being a successful academic career, Jennings undertook a number of jobs including photographer, painter and theatre designer. He joined GPO Film Unit, then under John Grierson, in 1934, largely it is thought because Jennings needed the income after the birth of his first daughter, rather than from a strong interest in film. Relations with his colleagues were difficult, they saw him as something of a dilettante, but he did form a friendship with Alberto Cavalcanti.

Jennings only feature length film, the 70-minute Fires Were Started (1943), also known as I Was A Fireman, details the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service in London. It blurs the lines between fiction and documentary because the scenes are re-enactments. This film, which uses techniques such as montage, is considered one of the classics of the genre.

His films are otherwise shorts, inclusively patriotic in sentiment and very British in their sensibility, such as: Spare Time (1939), London Can Take It! (1940), Words for Battle (1941), A Diary for Timothy (with a narration written by E.M. Forster, 1945), The Dim Little Island (1948) and Family Portrait (his last completed film, which tells of the Festival of Britain, 1950). Co-directed with Stewart McAllister, Jennings' best remembered short film is Listen to Britain (1942). Excerpts are often seen in other documentaries, especially portions of one of the concerts given by Dame Myra Hess in the National Gallery while its collection was evacuated for safe-keeping.

Jennings married Cicely Cooper in 1929; the couple had two daughters. He died in Poros, Greece in a fall on the cliffs of the Greek island while scouting locations for a film on post-war healthcare in Europe, and was buried in Athens.

Humphrey Jennings' reputation always remained very high among film makers, but had faded among others. His films appear strikingly different from the 'social critique' approach which typified the documentaries of Grierson and his "school" of the 1930s and the feature films of the 1960s and '70s such as Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1962) or Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

After 2001 this situation was partly rectified: firstly by the feature-length documentary by Oscar-winning documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald, Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain (made by Figment Films in 2002 for British television's Channel 4); and secondly by Kevin Jackson's 450-page biography Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004). In 2003 two of his films, Listen to Britain and Spare Time, were included in the Tate Britain retrospective, A Century of Artists' Film in Britain which featured the work of over one hundred filmmakers. The Macdonald documentary is included in the Region 2 DVD of I Was a Fireman (Fires Were Started) released by Film First in 2008.

On 14 May 2014, his 1939 film Spare Time was one of those chosen to be commemorated in a set of Royal Mail stamps depicting notable GPO Film Unit films.[3]